Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  “Did you ever ask your mother, you know, what it’s all about?” Not that I would blame him for a minute if he hadn’t.

  “She poked me and told me to mind my own business.”

  I fished my sunglasses out of my purse and stuck my elbow out the open window. I loved having somebody else drive. “I don’t care,” I said, leaning my head back. “Tomorrow, yes. Today, I am through with the whole thing.”

  Romeo reached over the gearshift and squeezed my hand.

  “Would you like a Nib?” I asked him.

  He nodded. I opened up the package and we ate them thoughtfully, one at a time. We commented on the price of blossoming cherry boughs as we took the expressway north to New Hampshire. We told each other stories of vacations we had taken as children and the vacations we had taken years later with our own children. We talked of the years we were broke and the years we were flush. We talked about how to raise a first-rate orchid. It was just past nine-thirty in the morning, and I thought that if nothing else were to happen from now until sundown, it would still be one of the happiest days I had had in years.

  After crossing the New Hampshire state line, we took the first exit to Salem and drove on to Canobie Lake Park. Although I had promised to take Tony and Sarah there this summer, I hadn’t been to the park myself since the girls were in grade school.

  “I know this may seem crazy,” Romeo said, “but it’s totally different coming here if you don’t have kids.”

  “What, you just come out here with no kids?”

  “No, I bring my grandkids, but I always imagined it would be really different without kids.”

  Everything was different if you didn’t bring the kids. I was always nervous in amusement parks—the revolting food you ended up eating, the creepy-looking carnies, the kids shooting off in every direction. It took exactly one second to lose them for good. I thought of it as a dangerous place full of dark hazards I had never imagined.

  But in the daylight, my two girls grown and my grandchildren safely at home, Canobie Lake Park seemed remarkably wholesome, if slightly tattered. The sawdust was clean. The ticket taker was a chubby woman about my age who wasn’t exactly warm (it was New Hampshire, after all) but was hardly menacing. The sky looked especially bright over the wooden spine of the roller coaster. In short, Canobie Lake Park appeared to me to be beautiful and romantic, which just goes to show it’s not where you’re at, it’s who you’re with.

  “We don’t open till ten,” the woman said from inside her booth. It must have been true. We seemed to be the only ones there. “You can go ahead in, but I don’t want you stirring up any trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble, exactly?” I asked.

  The woman leaned forward and gave us each a bracelet to wear that would entitle us to go anywhere and do anything, absolute freedom. “There’s no kind of trouble I haven’t seen in this place. I want you to stay clear of all of it.”

  We went in. We were getting away from trouble, not looking for it.

  “Does your family know you’re here?” I asked Romeo.

  Romeo shook his head. “I just snuck out. Sixty years old and I’m sneaking again. I haven’t had any reason to sneak in a long time.” He kissed me.

  “I wonder what would have happened if we had met when we were young,” I said, staring out at the beautiful day in front of me—the blue sky, the white dipping clouds, the cotton-candy smell of the air. “I mean, what if you had come up to me at that party in eighth grade? It could have happened. We lived in the same town, our families were in the same business. What would have happened if we had fallen in love in high school?”

  “The same thing that happened to Tony and Sandy, only worse. We didn’t handle it well with our kids, but our parents, they were from another generation. They would have killed us. Your father would have killed me and my mother would have killed you.”

  “Poked to death.”

  “I’m not even sure if I’m kidding. That was very serious hate. My mother had a hard enough time with Camille, who was Italian. Her mother played hearts with my mother. Her father was our butcher, and she still didn’t think Camille was the right girl for me.”

  “But she was,” I said.

  He smiled. “Camille was the right girl for me. There will never be another Camille. Just like there’ll never be another Julie.”

  I felt a pang of jealousy, not that he had loved her so much, but that my marriage hadn’t been like his. I wished I could say something kind about Mort. I wished I could say, Boy, there were years we were great. It just wasn’t true. There were plenty of years we were fine, maybe even good, but Mort and I were never great.

  “So, it was better that we didn’t meet then.”

  “My family doesn’t like you now, but at least they don’t want to kill you.”

  I thought about mentioning his son Joe, who certainly seemed capable of killing me if he took a mind to, but why spoil the day? “Do you ride the rides?” I asked him.

  Romeo stood behind me and put his arms around my waist. He bent over to put his chin on my shoulder. “I think about it,” he said softly into my ear. His voice made me shiver. “I used to when I was a kid. One of us would steal our parents’ car keys and we’d drive up here late at night, jump over the fence. We’d buy one ticket for the roller coaster and then we’d just refuse to get off. We’d hold on to the bars and dig in our heels. They would have had to get a saw and cut us out of that thing. Then after the first couple of rides they’d quit trying to fight us and they’d just leave us on all night. We’d ride over and over and over again. I’d go until I couldn’t feel my hands anymore.”

  “Bad kids,” I said, feeling strangely breathless as his hand slid under the back of my sweater. “My father would have been right to keep me away from you.”

  “You want to try it?”

  “She told us at the front not to make any trouble.”

  “I’m not talking about staying on forever, I’m talking about once.”

  I’d never been on a roller coaster. I had always been the one to stay on the ground and hold the popcorn bags. Not that anyone made me do it, it was just the role I chose for myself. They scared the living daylights out of me, but not as much as sushi. “Sure,” I said. “Anything once.”

  chapter twelve

  THAT WAS HOW THINGS STARTED. IT WAS THE ROLLER coaster and then the Scrambler, the Zipper. There were only a handful of Nibs in my stomach to contend with and I held them down bravely. We took it all on. When we wanted to scream, we screamed. We held each other’s hands and raised them over our heads. We went back to the roller coaster. The world spun in dazzling colors—yellow tents, black-haired children, dull grass, gold streamers. All of it merged, separated, reconfigured. We stumbled to the Paratrooper. We did loop-de-loops and hung upside down suspended from our harnesses. We did not care. Gravity had no effect on us. My inner ear gave up and stopped trying to fight me. I no longer knew when I was right side up or upside down; even after the crowds came and we had to stand in lines, there was nothing in my head that was still. And it felt right. Now my physical self matched my life. My body became the metaphor. I was reckless, disoriented, thoroughly spun. I was drunk with confusion and licorice and desire. As soon as the young man with the dagger and heart tattoo and the ten A.M. whiskey breath locked us in our cage, we were at each other like two mammals that deserved to be locked in a cage. We pawed and groped our way across each other’s bodies for as long as the price of admission allowed. Sometimes when the ride was over the guy would leer at us through the bars and yank back the controls that shot us up again toward the sun. One time the Zipper jerked backward twenty feet above the ground and I cut my lip on Romeo’s forehead. There wasn’t a lot of blood and it did not slow us down.

  By noon I could no longer put together full sentences. “I think I need …” I tried to say what it was I needed, but I no longer knew.

  “Rest. I need to rest,” Romeo said. There was a little bruise coming up on his forehead.r />
  He took my hand and we stumbled to the far side of the park. “Do you play Fascination?”

  “What is it?”

  “All you need to know is that you sit down and nothing moves.”

  The idea sounded so wonderful that tears actually came to my eyes.

  The Fascination Parlor was some combination of skee ball, tic-tac-toe, and bingo. We cashed in bills for a handful of quarters and took two red vinyl stools at the end of long steel cages.

  “This is where you win me cheesy stuffed animals that I keep in my bedroom,” I said. “Nora always had a hundred of those things. Every guy she ever met won her a highly flammable stuffed dog.”

  “I’m not going to win you anything,” he said, feeding two quarters into the slot. “I’ve always been rotten at Fascination, and right now my head is so screwed up I don’t think I could tie my shoes.”

  “Good.”

  He tossed a rubber ball up the rubber ramp and into the cage. Sure enough, it hit one wall and then the other and then came bouncing back to him.

  “That’s something,” I said. “Do you bowl?”

  “About like this, except the ball never rolls back to me.” He threw up another, which reached the same conclusion by following a completely different path.

  “Are you doing this to be amusing?”

  “Nope.” He threw again, this time whipping his wrist to the side to get a spin on the ball. It dropped into a hole on the bottom and disappeared. “I’m just unbelievably bad. I’m not just pretending to be bad so you’ll feel sorry for me.”

  With every loss I found myself more profoundly attracted to him. He seemed so happy to lose. Mort would have stormed off four quarters ago, making it clear to everyone within earshot that the whole thing was rigged and nobody could win no matter how good they were. He would be demanding to speak to the manager about now. Mort could manage to wheedle a refund from even the scariest guy in the park.

  Romeo gave me the quarters. “Go to work,” he said.

  I picked up the rubber ball and sank it in the middle square.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “You’re a ringer. I’ve brought a ringer to Canobie Lake.”

  “I have good hand-eye coordination.” I sank the next one in the upper left-hand hole. Actually, I don’t know what I had—dumb luck maybe. In all honesty the game just didn’t seem that complicated.

  “So tell me about Nora. She sounds like a tough girl.”

  “Very tough.” Ball three.

  “So how’d she turn out?”

  “She married an incredibly nice tax attorney and makes a fortune selling real estate. She drives a Lexus and wears good jewelry.”

  “I always wondered what happened to the tough girls,” he said.

  “Number Seven!” the caller said. “Number Seven wins the prize.”

  I had to check my seat to see if I was seven. When did I get to be so lucky? I told Romeo he had to pick the prize. After all, if he had won, he would have given it to me. He chose a stuffed cat with a small stuffed fish in its mouth. The fish had a huge smile on its face, as if it was thrilled to be devoured alive. “My granddaughter will like this,” he said. “She has a thing for cats.”

  “Does she have a cat?”

  Romeo shook his head. “That’s one of my mother’s primary rules—no cats.” Should I worry about a man who lived with his mother? What difference did it make. I was never going to get anywhere near the old woman. Whatever relationship we had in the future would surely consist of long car drives and sneaking around. All around us people ate caramel apples and held hands. They took pictures of one another in front of rides. They screamed for their children and laughed outrageously at nothing. They wore long, thin balloons wrapped around their heads and walked invisible dogs on quivering, empty leashes. Romeo had one arm around my shoulder and one arm around the stuffed cat he called Tiger. This was a wonderful day, but it was as little like anything in my real life as I could possibly imagine. We went to a stand and bought clam fritters and Cokes. We ate standing up and when we were finished, we went back and ordered fried clam rolls and ate them, too.

  “Hey,” I said, wiping the fine coating of seafood from my mouth with a paper napkin. “Not to spoil the mood or anything, but do you have any thoughts on, you know, this? Us? I keep going over it and I keep coming up empty. The only really logical thing to do is quit before we get started, but then I think we’ve already started.”

  He tightened his grip on me. I could feel the muscles in his arm go hard against the back of my neck. His kissed the top of my head. “Part of me says my family comes first,” he said. “That’s the primary law with the Cacciamanis and I believe in it. I can’t stay with you because I don’t want to hurt my mother and I especially don’t want to hurt my children. The other part of me says to hell with that. I’ve been a good guy all these years, a team player, and I want to do what I want to do. Anyway, we’re not hurting them. You’re not a bad person. You’re not going to tear my family apart.”

  “I don’t think Nora is speaking to me, and Sandy is speaking to me, but she’s profoundly disappointed in my actions. I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to hold up under that kind of pressure. I mean, you and I aren’t going to run off to Belize. We’re not going to ditch our kids, never see our grandkids again.”

  “Maybe, over time, they’d get used to us together.”

  But neither one of us said anything to that. Every interaction I had with Cacciamanis, other than Romeo, only made things worse. Instead of coming to the conclusion that this was all a silly tradition, I was starting to think my mother and father were right. It wasn’t just that his sons thought I was a monster, I was beginning to think they were monsters, too. I’m sure they were perfectly decent to other people, but to me they were little more than a looming mafia.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to a tent up ahead. “That’s what we need, spiritual guidance.” That’s what the tent said, PSYCHIC READINGS AND SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE. PALMS, TAROT, CRYSTAL BALL.

  “Oh, Al loves to give sermons on those things.”

  “I suppose he’s against them.”

  “Al thinks you should take your spiritual guidance from God.”

  “Al gets a vote in this?”

  “He is my best friend and my priest. It gives him a kind of double authority.”

  “Well, Al doesn’t have sex and he doesn’t have children. We need extra help.”

  I was a great reader of horoscopes, if not a great believer in them. I loved the idea of being assessed. All I wanted was a second opinion from an unbiased third party. The unseen person in the tent seemed as good a shot as any.

  “I don’t know,” Romeo said, eyeing the tent like it was a center for some cult religion that snatched up teenaged runaways and forced them into saffron robes.

  “Hey, I rode the Zipper,” I said. “I’ve made my leap of faith for the day. You need to make yours.”

  We walked over, and after a moment’s indecision about how to proceed, I rapped on the wooden sign. A woman in her sixties who looked like every woman in my neighborhood stuck her head out from the flap. She had short salt-and-pepper hair, a light-blue pullover, a little pink lipstick. She smiled at us. “One minute,” she said, then disappeared again.

  So we waited, not saying anything, kissing to pass the time, until a skinny blond girl about fourteen years old ducked out from under the tarp and flew off like a bird to find her friends.

  “Think of all the future she had to hear about,” Romeo said. “At least we won’t take long.”

  A hand with short nails and no rings shot out from under the flap and waved us in. It was cramped and dark inside. We had to stoop or our heads would have lifted up the center of the tent. There were two dozen candles and a little electric fan. The fortune-teller was wearing jeans and gardening clogs. I was disappointed. I was hoping for something a little more exotic.

  “You wanted Mata Hari,” she said brightly. “I’m Ellen. I used to be Madame Zikestra
, but the wig and the robes drove me insane. It gets very hot in here in the summer.”

  “No, you’re fine,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure you’re fine.” Did she read minds or did everybody ask her the same question?

  “I only do one at a time,” she said pleasantly.

  I shook my head. “This is a joint deal,” I told her. “What we need to find out, we need to find out together.”

  She thought it over for a minute. “Okay,” Ellen said. “But for the two of you it’s going to be twenty bucks.”

  “Really?” Romeo said.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” Ellen said.

  I reached into my purse and put a twenty down on the table.

  “There’s only one chair,” she said.

  So Romeo and I split the chair, each of us hanging one leg off the side. We were no closer than we had been on any of the rides.

  “All right, let’s get something for your money here. Let me see those hands.” She appeared to be a distant cousin of the older Doris Day, all button-nosed and bright-eyed.

  “Don’t you want to hear the problem first?” I said.

  She shook her head. “Hands.”

  We put both of our hands faceup on the table, four palms turned up to the dim light. Romeo had on his wedding ring and Ellen tapped it once. “You’re not married,” she said.

  “Not to her,” Romeo said.

  “Not to anybody,” Ellen said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Not to anybody alive, and we can’t be married to the dead. That’s the first thing I have to tell you.”

  Romeo looked more interested then.

  She traced her nail lightly across my palms and then went to Romeo’s, then back to mine. “Most days are very boring,” she said. I thought she was talking about our lives, in which case she would have been right about that, too. “I sit in this tent and all these little girls come in. ‘How many babies will I have?’ ‘Does he really love me?’ ‘Am I going to get a car for my birthday?’ On and on and on. The things I see I could never tell them, anyway. They’re only children, after all. They don’t need to know anything. They should have their happiness. For example, if you had come in here at fourteen,” she said to Romeo, “you wouldn’t have wanted to hear that you were going to fall in love with a very kind woman and that you’ll have seven children together and one of those children will die when she is a little baby. No boy at fourteen could make sense of that. Marriage, children, death—what would it even mean? I couldn’t tell you that later on your wife was going to get breast cancer and die. To know all of that before would be unbearable.” She shook her head in sympathy for it all. “If you had heard it and believed me, you would have thought it would be impossible to survive. But people survive terrible things. Now all those facts are history. Now I can tell you the truth. But if I had told you then, it would have been cruel.”